Entries by Radley Balko

America's long drug war has produced countless tragedies, ruined lives and led to parentless children, as well as the deaths of drug warriors, nonviolent offenders and innocents. As marijuana advocates and drug policy reformers around the nation celebrate 4/20, take a look...

The year 2013 marked the 50th anniversary of two landmark Supreme Court cases in criminal defense law. In Brady v. Maryland, the Court ruled that prosecutors are required by law to turn favorable evidence over to defense attorneys. And in Gideon v. Wainwright, the Court ruled that for felony cases,...

A couple years ago, I wrote a story about efforts by citizens in the town of Keane, New Hampshire, to block their city council from purchasing a DHS-funded BearCat armored personnel carrier from the Lenco company. One of the residents I interviewed was Dorrie O'Meara, who owns a...

As we come to the end of a year that saw revelations about massive government spying programs, horrifying stories of police abuse, and brazen violations of the Fourth Amendment, I thought I might offer my own grim predictions about where civil liberties are headed in the coming year. Sure, some...

Reason TV has the story of Charles Samuel Couch, the caretaker of a disabled boy who was embarrassed and humiliated during a ridiculous sex sting operation in Manhattan Beach, California. He had done nothing wrong.

The Reason folks ask the obvious question here -- don't these cops have anything better to do than to snoop around to find people having sex in public bathrooms?

But there are a couple of other issues, here. First is this general trend of posting the mug shots of arrestees on the web. These pages usually include a tiny disclaimer noting that an arrest doesn't necessarily imply guilt. Still. The whole point of posting their mugshots is to embarrass them -- which of course does them harm. What do we people whose reputations are ruined when the cops get it wrong?

The other troubling thing about this story is that according to the lawsuit, as part of the investigation, one of these cops was apparently peering through the stall, watching this young kid go to the bathroom. Was that really necessary?

I can certainly see the problems with allowing people to regularly use public bathrooms for sexual encounters. But there must be better solutions than to station undercover cops in those bathrooms to spy on us as we relieve...

Today is the 80th anniversary of Repeal Day, when America finally lifted its disastrous, 13-year experiment with alcohol prohibition. Here are a few facts about booze and Prohibition you may not have known:

-- Though Prohibition led to a spike in homicides, widespread corruption, alcohol poisonings, and undermined respect for...

A whopper of an investigation from the L.A. Times over the weekend found that the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department -- the largest sheriff's department in America -- is hiring cops with histories of disciplinary and abuse of force problems. Of the 280 new hires in 2010 at...

Last week, I flew out to Los Angeles to do an interview for HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher. You can watch video of the interview below. I typically don't enjoy TV interviews all that much, because most of the interviews I've done are on cable news, where you have...

We now know that federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies are using automated license-plate scanners, mounted on everything from telephone poles to police cars, to build a huge database of where people are driving. This might seem like...